BANGALORE — July 4, 2005 - SAP AG SAP Labs India, SAP's largest
development facility outside Germany, announced the inauguration of the first
SAP NetWeaver Center of Excellence (COE). The facility will be run by SAP Custom
Development and will be located at the SAP Labs campus in Bangalore.
The purpose of the COE will be to facilitate the process of educating SAP
partners in India and Asia Pacific on the SAP NetWeaver platform in order to
enable a faster adoption of Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA).
The COE will provide support on a project basis to assist SAP partners in
developing prototype and pilot solutions for unique customer requirements, and
migrating legacy systems onto the SAP NetWeaver platform. This will be done by
leveraging global expertise in implementing SAP NetWeaver within a controlled
environment.
SAP partners will be supported by a global team of experts on SAP NetWeaver
technology. The COE will offer advanced workshops on various SAP NetWeaver
topics in order to give partners the opportunity to gain hands-on exposure to
this platform and will include case studies to ensure that partners are exposed
to newly-developed solutions that are relevant to real-life implementation
situations.
The SAP NetWeaver COE is an initiative started by SAP Custom Development —
an SAP line of business dedicated to helping customers drive more value out of
their SAP investment by developing unique and innovative business processes on
the SAP business process platform.
The COE was inaugurated by Harald Stuckert, Senior Vice President &
General Manager, SAP Custom Development, at a function attended by several key
SAP India partners. Speaking at the launch, Mr. Stuckert said, "The SAP
NetWeaver Center of Excellence reinforces SAP's commitment to its partners and
will enable them to grow their business by expanding their development offerings
to better address our customers' needs."
The COE will be headed by Rajesh Agarwala, Director, SAP NetWeaver COE. Mr.
Agarwala is a nine-year veteran with SAP. Describing the COE's objective, Mr.
Agarwala said, "At SAP, we understand how important it is to deliver and
support integrated end-to-end solutions that provide unparalleled value to our
customers. The COE is a key initiative to ensure successful solution
deployment."
The COE facility consists of state-of-the-art infrastructure, which is
equipped with the latest 24X7 landscape servers and systems, conference rooms
and project rooms for partners to interact with global development experts.
SAP NetWeaver is an open integration and application platform that supports
business change, growth and innovation while reducing IT costs and complexities.
It is a technical enabler of ESA, which is a blueprint for implementing
enterprise-scale business solutions and flexible IT infrastructures by
leveraging Web services and other open standards.
The COE in Bangalore marks another significant initiative in SAP's efforts
to meet growing customer demands for expertise in SAP NetWeaver technology. In
2003, SAP established the SAP Developer Network (SDN) to facilitate the transfer
of knowledge and information between developers inside and outside SAP by
providing technical articles, Web training, code samples, evaluation tools,
special interest groups and developer-specific events, in addition to detailed
technical reference materials.